Ranma ½

Episode 22

I'm very curious how “Not Your Typical Juliet” comes across to newbies. It's been heavily pushed in all of the promotional art and posters for the current season of Ranma ½, Ranma and Akane's “kiss” front and center in what is clearly an auditorium. After all that, it feels like it should be an event. Like some sort of major shift should be happening at the end of it.

But it's not, really. “Not Your Typical Juliet” is at its heart a highly typical episode of Ranma ½, after all. You introduce a Situation – in this case, Akane playing Juliet in a theater competition – and mix in some of the cast's myriad nuts and flakes. Boom, you have granola… I mean, hijinks. This time, the nuts and flakes are Gosunkugi, Kuno, and Happosai, all of whom want to play Romeo for a chance to kiss Akane. Ranma pouts and refuses to take interest until he hears the prize: a chance to visit China. From that point on, nothing will get between him and victory, except maybe for having to kiss his fiancée.

It's a good episode! It's even arguably one of the best of the season so far, right alongside “It's Fast, or It's Free,” another granola episode. More than anything, it's a great episode for Akane, who is thrilled to be asked to play one of theater's most iconic female roles after being pressured to play Romeo in her elementary school class performance. It's borderline gender euphoria. Akane, with her short hair and pugnacious temperament, has always been perceived by others as masculine. She's pretty enough to do it and still get attention from boys, but the term “tomboy” has haunted her for most of her life.

It's an interesting commentary on gender as a performance versus internalized identity, isn't it? Akane doesn't see herself as masculine. She likes pretty dresses and cute things. But because she fails to perform femininity properly, no matter how girlish she sees herself and acts in other ways, nobody else sees her the same way. Her joy isn't just at the opportunity to play Juliet, but to act in a role where nobody can disagree or deny that she is performing as an icon of femininity. Even if three jabronis who don't even know who Romeo and Juliet are insist on crashing the stage, it's not about them. It's about Akane. But then Ranma gets wind of an opportunity to go to China and maybe go back to Jusenkyo and, well, it's always about what Ranma wants in the end, isn't it?

It's like watching a slow-motion car crash at the intersection of all things that bring out the worst in Ranma: competition, the prospect of removing his curse, and the idea of showing Akane the slightest bit of affection. At first, he agrees to play the part, much to Akane's relief that she won't have to smooch Kuno, Gosunkugi, or Happosai. But it turns out he thought Romeo was Juliet's dad, not her lover.

The proceedings, of course, have very little to do with the actual story of Shakespeare's play. The drama competition opens up with Akane ecstatically reciting Juliet's famous balcony monologue, but things devolve swiftly as her would-be Romeos start fighting each other to be the one to kiss her. Ranma manages to shove the others out of the way, but as is typical, he doesn't know his lines.

There are some fun cultural notes here! When Soun shows up on-stage in all black to feed Ranma his lines, he's wearing the “kuroku” outfit of stagehands in traditional Japanese theater. That's a signal to his audience that even if he's fully visible, they're supposed to pretend he's not there. When the audience starts clamoring for Ranma and Akane to kiss, you have to understand just how salacious that was in 1980s Japan; public displays of affection beyond hand-holding were, and still are to a degree, considered in extremely poor taste. That's why Genma starts holding up signs that seem like the sort of thing you'd see outside of a strip club: what they were doing was borderline exhibitionism.

But of course, all that attention makes Ranma shy and panic, digging in his heels and refusing to let the play continue because he's a half-feral teenage boy who doesn't know how to deal with his feelings for a girl. Instead of just playing by the rules, he switches genders mid-play and claims the role of Juliet for himself to take control of the action. It's so deeply, deeply self-centered and unkind to Akane, even if he at least partially sees himself as saving her from the prospect of having to kiss one of the other three potential Romeos.

By the way: in the manga and older anime, Kuno did indeed force-feed Ranma an entire bottle of alcohol and get him drunk. However, changes in broadcast standards have made it so you can't show minors committing crimes on Japanese television, so they had to alter the scene. What remains unchanged is that the action in a particular part of the episode, with Ranma tricking Happosai and fighting off Kuno before stage-kissing him, is some of the best of the season, on par with “It's Fast, or It's Free.”

And to this storyline's credit, it does understand just how crappy Ranma is being to Akane in stealing the play from her. When Akane loses her temper at him, it's not about her being unreasonable or jumping to conclusions because she's too hotheaded to stop and understand what's going on. She is justifiably upset that not only did Ranma interlope on her moment in the spotlight, but he refused to kiss her but would kiss Kuno. She's hurt! She was so excited to play Juliet, and now it's been completely spoiled! And the person who spoiled it is being rude to her! It doesn't matter if he's acting this way because he actually really likes her and is feeling shy!

Big props to the drama club president, who narrates every shift in the story without missing a single beat. When Gosunkugi chloroforms Akane, they dress her as Snow White and put her in a coffin, like at the climax of the fairy tale. When the sponsor announces that they'll win if Juliet gets kissed, they work that in too. Unconditional support to Akane, who tapes over Ranma's mouth and wins them the contest. Critical support as well to the translation team, who did their best to maintain the lexical ambiguity necessary for the big ending twist: the “China travel invitation” was not an all-inclusive vacation to China for the winners, but a sponsored party for a traveler from China. I prefer the manga's translation, which went with the less tortured phrasing “see China,” and made it so the party was to meet a famous actor nicknamed China.

Good episode. Can we please do “The Breaking Point” now?

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Ranma ½ is currently streaming on Netflix.